One of the biggest problems with Windows Vista was its rather convoluted and complicated SKU scheme, where there were far too many different versions of Vista to figure out. To make matters worse, the Home Basic version left out several defining parts of the operating system leaving customers with a sense of being lured in by certain features that in the end turned out not to be there. With Windows 7, the company will still offer a myriad of different versions, but according to Microsoft Senior Vice President Bill Veghte, it will be a lot less problematic than with Vista.

"Next Monday, Amazon will likely unveil the next version of its Kindle e-book reader at a press conference in New York. But how did the gadget do last year before it sold out in November? Pretty well! Via a research note, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney now thinks Amazon sold 500,000 Kindles last year, more than his previous estimate of 380,000 (and if Amazon hadn't run out of Kindles in November, it could have potentially sold 750,000, Mahaney estimates). Mahaney now thinks Amazon's all-in Kindle revenue could reach $1.4 billion in 2010, or an impressive 4% of Amazon's revenue that year. This assumes that Amazon will sell 1 million Kindles in 2009 and 3.5 million in 2010; that Kindle owners buy one book per month, etc. It's an admittedly rough estimate, but not necessarily an unbelievable one."

Roger Grimes offers a comparative overview of browser security, including profiles of Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari, and Opera. Grimes subjected each browser to numerous tests, including dozens of pre-defined tests made in his lab, Internet-based test suites, and exposing the browsers to known-malicious Web sites. "None of the fully patched browsers allowed silent infections or exploitation beyond simple DoS attacks. All of the browsers stopped the latest malicious attacks available on the Internet. Occasional zero-day attacks could silently infect a particular browser during a particular period of time, but all of the browsers have this same risk, and all of the browser vendors in this review are fairly consistent in patching significant problems in a timely manner." The package also includes articles on each browser's XSS vulnerability profile and cipher support.

Python 3 is the latest version of Guido van Rossum's powerful general-purpose programming language. It breaks backwards compatibility with the 2.x line but has cleaned up some syntax issues. This second article builds on the previous article, which focused on changes that affect the language and backwards compatibility issues. In Part 2 of this two-part series, discover more new Python features and details on more advanced topics such as changes in abstract base classes, metaclasses, and decorators.

Creating a new operating system isn't an easy task. Even if you have dozens, hundreds of people, it may still take years. And even if you do get some code out there, chances are no one will really give a flying monkey butt, and your hard work will wither away in irrelevance. You really need something unique in order to stand out and be noticed, and Dmitry Zavalishin claims he has that something: his Phantom OS never dies.

There are many tools available that allow you to synchronize files across UNIX directories, but doing it effectively, and securely, takes a little bit more effort. This article looks at solutions for synchronizing files across UNIX filesystems and different computer systems securely, and at solutions that allow you to synchronize encrypted versions of your files for the purposes of backup.

Following Acer, Asus has now also announced its first netbook based on Intel's new Atom N280 platform. The Asus EeePC 1000HE is basically the same machine as the Acer internally, but the Asus comes with a massive 8700mAh battery which supposedly delivers a battery life of 9.5 hours. No information on operating system options yet, but price is set at 399 USD.

A long time ago, we asked everyone to show their desktops, and we figured it would be nice, on this (for me) cold and dreary Monday to do that all over again, over two years later. The questions remain the same: cluttered or clean? Icons or no icons? Dual or single panel layout in GNOME? How free-form is your Plasma desktop? Are there any real computer users in here (as in, using CDE)? Read on for my own two desktops.

Since it's nigh on impossible to produce accurate figures of operating system usage, we have to make do with figures that provide a rough estimate, at best. One such set of statistics are the figures from Net Applications, which tracks the 160 million monthly visitors to its hosted websites. The latest figures from January 2009 have been published, and they show that the rise of Mac OS X continues, as well as that of the iPhone and iPod Touch. Unsurprisingly, Windows 7 did quite well too.

The team behind KolibriOS has released a new version, KolibriOS 0.7.5.0. This operating system is written entirely in assembly language and fits on a single floppy disk. Sadly, there is no information available on what exactly has changed between this version and the last one, so all I can do is point you towards the downloads section.

Intel just announced the Moblin 2 alpha release available to the public for testing. Get out the good old netbook and have a go with the release; it's confirmed to work relatively well with the Acer Aspire One and the Dell Mini 9. Those of you with bitty Eee netbooks aren't completely left out in the cold-- you'll just have to go without wireless for the time being.

Sony just reported that through the fourth quarter of 2008, their profits plummeted a staggering 95%, losing $1.67 billion. The reported down profits were taken from last year's Christmas season, usually the time of the year that all companies including Sony sell the most products. This is the first loss that Sony has reported since 1995 when they produced several box-office flops. In lieu of the situation, Sony is reportedly cutting 8,000 jobs and going to shut down five or six of the 57 worldwide factories. Will the headless chicken that is the economy ever recover?

Earlier this morning, you may have been surprised to see that every Google search you performed resulted in links to sites which were, according to Google, potentially harmful to your computer. As it turns out, Google's malware detection system got a little trigger-happy - due to a human error.

From the announcement email: "On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, I am proud to announce that the first release candidate of NetBSD 5.0 is now available for download. Those of you who have been paying close attention will have noticed that RC1 was tagged on Sunday. A few hiccups delayed the availability of binaries, but they can now be downloaded from here."